My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I
remember,
a time of chaos, ruined dreams, this wasted land. But most of all, I
remember
The Road Warrior. The man we called Max.

To understand who he was you have to go back to another time, when
the
world was powered by the black fuel, and the deserts sprouted
great cities of pipe and steel.

Gone now. Swept away. For reasons long forgotten two mighty warrior
tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them
all.
Without fuel they were nothing. They had built a house of straw. The
thunder
of machines sputtered and stopped.

Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem
the
everlarge. Their world crumbled. Cities exploded. A whirlwind of
looting.
A firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.

On the roads it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough
to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took
over
the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this
maelstrom
of decay ordinary men were battered and smashed, men like Max, the
warrior
Max.

In the roar of an engine he lost everything and became as shell of a
man, a burned-out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his
past,
a man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here, in this
blighted
place, that he learned to live again . . .

. . . And so began the journey northward, to safety, to our place in
the sun. Among us we found a new leader, the man who came from the sky,
the Gyro Captain. And just as Papagallo had planned, we traveled far
beyond
the reach of men and machine. The juice, the precious juice, was hidden
in the vehicles.

As for me, I grew to manhood. In the fullness of time, I became the
leader, the chief of the Great Northern Tribe.

And for The Road Warrior, that was the last we saw of him. He lives
now, only in my memories.